Yes — Hotjar has a free plan. It's called Hotjar Basic and it costs nothing to sign up and start using.

But "free" and "useful" are different things. And depending on how much traffic your site gets and what you're trying to understand about your visitors, the free plan may give you just enough to see that something is wrong — without enough data to figure out what.

Here's exactly what Hotjar's free plan includes, where it falls short, and what to do if the limitations are a problem for you.

What Hotjar's free plan actually includes

35 daily sessions

This is the most important number to understand about Hotjar's free plan.

A session is recorded each time a visitor lands on your site and Hotjar captures their behaviour. The free plan caps you at 35 of these per day. Once you hit 35 recorded sessions, Hotjar stops recording for the rest of that day — regardless of how many more visitors arrive.

35 sessions resets at midnight. The next day you get another 35.

To put that in context: if your site gets 500 visitors a day, Hotjar is capturing 7% of them. The heatmaps you see and the recordings you watch represent a small, potentially unrepresentative slice of your actual traffic.

For a brand new site with minimal traffic — say, under 50 daily visitors — 35 sessions covers most of your audience and the free plan is genuinely useful. For anything beyond that, the cap becomes a real limitation fast.

Session recordings

Within the 35-session daily limit, Hotjar records full sessions — mouse movement, clicks, scrolls, and form interactions. You can watch these recordings back, filter them by basic criteria, and look for patterns.

What you can't do on the free plan: filter specifically to rage click sessions or u-turn sessions. Those filters — which let you skip straight to the recordings where something clearly went wrong — are locked behind the Plus plan at $39/month.

Heatmaps

Click maps, move maps, and scroll maps are available on the free plan. These are built from the data captured within your 35-session daily limit, so the same representativeness caveat applies — on a high-traffic site, you're looking at a sample.

Heatmaps on the free plan are unlimited in number — you can create heatmaps for as many pages as you want. The limitation is the underlying data they're built from, not the number of heatmaps themselves.

Surveys and feedback widgets

The free plan includes one survey and one feedback widget running at a time. You can ask visitors questions and collect feedback, but only through a single active survey and a single active feedback button simultaneously.

For basic qualitative research — understanding why visitors are leaving or what they came looking for — one survey is enough to get started.

Data storage

Hotjar stores your data for 365 days on the free plan. This is surprisingly generous and means you can look back at recordings and heatmap data from up to a year ago without upgrading.

What Hotjar's free plan doesn't include

Rage click and u-turn filters

On the free plan, you can watch session recordings — but you have to scroll through them manually to find the interesting ones. The rage click filter (sessions where a visitor clicked the same element repeatedly in frustration) and the u-turn filter (sessions where a visitor moved toward converting and then left) are Plus features.

These filters are genuinely useful because they let you skip straight to the sessions where something went wrong. Without them, finding the signal in your recordings takes significantly longer.

Events API

The Events API — which lets you trigger recordings based on specific user actions, like clicking a button or reaching a certain point in a form — is not available on the free plan. This limits how precisely you can target your recordings.

Console tracking

Free plan recordings don't capture JavaScript errors that occur during a session. If a visitor's session ends because something broke on your page, you won't see the error in the recording. This is a Plus feature.

Trends

The Trends feature — which tracks specific metrics over time so you can spot patterns — is not available on the free plan. You can watch individual recordings and look at heatmaps, but you can't track how specific behaviours change week over week.

Integrations

Hotjar's integrations with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, and Google Analytics are locked behind paid plans. On the free plan, Hotjar is a standalone tool with no connection to the rest of your stack.

Who the free plan actually works for

Early-stage sites with low traffic. If you're getting under 50 visitors a day, 35 sessions covers most of your audience. You can watch recordings of nearly every visitor, build meaningful heatmaps, and run a basic survey. For this use case, the free plan is genuinely useful.

Testing the tool before committing. If you want to understand what Hotjar does before paying for it, the free plan gives you a real feel for the interface and the core features. Two weeks on the free plan will tell you whether session recordings and heatmaps are useful for your workflow.

Occasional investigation. If you only occasionally need to look at visitor behaviour — maybe after a redesign or when troubleshooting a specific page — the free plan might be enough for that limited use case even on a higher-traffic site.

Who the free plan doesn't work for

Sites with more than 100 daily visitors. At 100+ daily visitors, the 35-session cap means you're seeing less than 35% of your traffic. The heatmaps and recordings become less reliable as a representative sample. You're making decisions based on a minority of your actual visitors.

Anyone who needs rage click or u-turn filters. If you want to find the sessions where visitors showed frustration — which is usually the most valuable information in your recordings — you need Plus at $39/month.

Teams that need integrations. If you want Hotjar data to flow into your CRM, your Slack, or your analytics stack, you need a paid plan.

The free alternative worth knowing about

If Hotjar's 35-session limit is the problem, Microsoft Clarity is worth installing immediately. It's completely free — forever — with no session cap. Unlimited recordings, heatmaps, and automatic rage click and dead click detection, all at no cost.

Clarity doesn't have surveys, form analytics, or the integrations Hotjar's paid plans offer. But for pure heatmaps and session recordings with no limitations, it's the strongest free option available and directly addresses Hotjar's main free plan weakness.

The limitation neither free plan solves

Here's something worth understanding before you commit to any free plan — Hotjar's or anyone else's.

Hotjar Basic gives you 35 sessions a day. Microsoft Clarity gives you unlimited sessions. But both tools give you the same thing at the end: data to interpret yourself.

You watch the recordings. You look at the heatmaps. You try to spot the pattern. You form a hypothesis. You decide what to test. That interpretive work is entirely yours on every free plan — and on every paid plan too.

For a small business owner or founder without dedicated analysis time, that's often where the value breaks down. Not because the data isn't there, but because turning data into a clear decision about what to fix takes more time than most people have.

This is why Wahilens exists. Instead of giving you recordings to watch and heatmaps to interpret, Wahilens watches your site automatically all week and tells you what it found — in plain English, ranked by revenue impact, delivered to your inbox every Monday morning.

"8 of 10 visitors who reached your checkout left at the phone number field. Estimated impact: ~$1,200/month. Suggested fix: make the phone number field optional."

No recordings to watch. No heatmaps to interpret. No hypotheses to form. Just the finding, the estimated cost, and the fix.

Wahilens tracks rage clicks, dead clicks, form drop-offs, scroll depth, and exit patterns automatically — with no session limits, no daily cap, and no events to configure. One script tag. $10/month flat. And if you want to prove the fix worked, it runs the A/B test for you automatically.

The quick answer

Is Hotjar free? Yes — the Basic plan is free with no time limit.

Is the free plan enough? It depends entirely on your traffic. Under 50 daily visitors, probably yes. Over 100 daily visitors, probably not — the 35-session cap means you're only seeing a fraction of what's happening on your site.

What's the best free alternative if the cap is a problem? Microsoft Clarity — unlimited sessions, unlimited recordings, completely free.

What if you want answers instead of data to interpret? Wahilens — $10/month, no session limits, plain-English findings delivered to your inbox every week.

The free plan is a good starting point. Just know what you're starting with.

Is Hotjar Free? What You Actually Get on the Free Plan